Category Archives: Sales Management

What makes a great sales manager? 1. A great sales manager sets goals and priorities. Each day brings unlimited opportunities that must be addressed with limited resources. How, then, do you perform at your best today while you address the needs of tomorrow? Without clear goals, it is easy to get bogged down and lose…

The Role of the Sales Leader: Firstly and most importantly senior sales management needs to be closely involved from the beginning to the end of any initiative designed to make an impact on their organization. Ownership of this cannot be outsourced. It must be driven and supported from the very top. HR, Learning and Development,…

First – a confession. We’ve engaged in sales training assignments for clients and have NOT helped them improve sales results. At least, not in any significant, measurable manner. And so, in 2012, we resolve to only work with clients in which we are absolutely, with 100% clarity and certainty, helping organizations to sell more than…

The art of coaching effectively is not an easy one to master. It literally takes years of on-the-job experience to appreciate what it means to be a good coach, and to learn when and how to adjust our coaching styles under different circumstances. Hence it makes sense to build a coaching process that is very…

Every sales manager hopes and prays for a team full of superstars. Never happens! In fact, most sales managers I know would kill for just one superstar. The average sales team tends to follow the classic bell curve with about 10 to 15 percent of the team being excellent performers, 10 to 15 percent of…

One of the most contentious issues sales managers have to contend with is the compensation plan. Sometimes these plans are foisted upon us from on high and sometimes we have to work them out for ourselves. Either way, they have the potential to be a pain in the duffis! This article isn’t about developing a…

I was having a therapy session recently with a couple of district sales managers when an interesting topic came up – coping with overload. By the way, a therapy session is when I buy someone lunch and they use the opportunity to vent. In this particular case, one of the sales managers, whom I’ll call…

Some sales managers are afraid to train! That’s right. They don’t want to train because they either feel it might be an admission that the people they hired aren’t up to snuff, or they’re concerned about what upper management might say if they ask for training dollars. Two Key Facts Here are a couple of…

Are you guilty of hanging on to your poor performers far too long? Sales Managers often are too soft-hearted when it comes to a salesperson’s poor performance. We tell ourselves that our long-time employee is just having a bad week (month, quarter, year) and that he’ll snap out of it soon. Or that the new hire that isn’t up…

Actually, selling is not a sport but there are a lot of similarities between selling and some sports. Let’s explore some of those similarities and what you can learn from sports to improve your sales performance. By sports I’m referring to such sports as baseball, hockey, football, tennis, soccer, and other sports involving some skill…